Rupert Murdoch, Meet Janet Malcolm — Pro Scandalist

A few months ago,The Paris Review published an interview with The New Yorker's Janet Malcolm. It was conducted, at Malcolm's insistence and with interviewer Katie Roiphe's consent, entirely through email, and like so much of what Malcolm has written, it turned into a highly self-conscious narrative about who gets to control the narrative when a nonfiction writer sets out to tell someone else's story. Because she's made a living writing about the lengths nonfiction writers will go to wrest control from their unsuspecting "subjects," Malcolm, in the interview, never comes close to ceding it; indeed, she dictates terms to Roiphe even as she insists that literal possession of the last word enables nonfiction writers to always dictate terms. There is no question about who controls Kate Roiphe's interview with Janet Malcolm, and for this Malcolm earns not just Roiphe's admiration, but her awe.

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Well, the Times finally got around to writing about Janet Malcolm's "Art of Nonfiction" interview in the Sunday Review, in an opinion piece by James Atlas, a biographer who is writing about the effect of email on biography. On the face of it, Atlas's piece seems to be arriving at least a season too late; once you take a look at what's on the Times' front page, however, the timing appears downright providential. After all, Malcolm is well-known for her flat declaration that journalism — without qualifiers — is "morally reprehensible," and in the pages of the Timesthe story of Rupert Murdoch's entanglement in Great Britain's hacking scandal would seem to bear her out. The scandal might even seem to bear out what Malcolm announced to Roiphie, which is that twenty years ago, when she suggested in The Journalist and the Murderer that what journalists do to murderers is akin to and even worse than what murderers do to their victims: "My analysis of journalistic betrayal was seen as betrayal of journalism itself as well as a piece of royal chutzpah. Today, my critique seems obvious, even banal. No one argues with it, and yes, it has degenerated — as critiques do — into a sort of lame excuse."

I will agree that no one argues with Janet Malcolm anymore, least of all of Kate Roiphe, who lets Malcolm's proclamation of self-vindication pass without further comment. I will argue, however, that the journalistic internalization of Janet Malcolm as "journalistic conscience" constitutes a scandal in its own right, if only because for all the undeniable power of her rhetoric and "the nice sting" of her one-liners (she is the Henny Youngman of self-hating journalists), she's utterly full of shit. Worse, Janet Malcolm is both self-serving and self-descriptive; in her most recent book she writes that "malice remains [journalism's] animating impulse," when it's clear to anyone who reads her work that very few journalists are more animated by malice than Janet Malcolm. But the worst thing about her is that anybody who has ever done so much as cover a fire knows her shtick, and no one calls her on it. I suppose this is because she works at a magazine that's supposed to represent the epitome of good breeding, journalistic and otherwise; but of course the very existence of The New Yorker — and the work of writers like Dexter Filkins, Jon Lee Anderson, Jane Mayer, and Raffi Khatchadourian, et al — is in itself ample refutation of her unimpeachable thesis. But I don't have to go so far afield to know that Janet Malcolm is lying about journalists and what they do. Last year, she wrote a piece for The New Yorker about a murder trial in Queens, and from her experience came up with the kind of stinging formulation that delights her fans and convinces them of her moral sway: "A trial offers unique opportunities for journalistic heartlessness." This year, Ryan D'Agostino wrote a piece for Esquire about a murder trial in Connecticut, and from his experience came up with a miracle of journalistic sympathy.

I could stop there, and let real journalism speak for journalism. But I won't, because it won't. Janet's Malcolm's a self-hater whose work has managed to speak for the self-hatred (not to mention the class issues) of a profession that has designs on being "one of the professions" but never will be. And so in Sunday's Times, James Atlas writes admiringly of Kate Roiphe's supine interview with Janet Malcolm, then goes Roiphe one better by writing admiringly of Janet Malcolm when she blows him off. And so journalists will keep on lining up to read Malcolm's stinging estimation of them in the same way that they gather faithfully in front of the television to hear Jon Stewart call them lazy and incompetent. They might not need editors anymore, in the age of the Internet, but in the absence of editors they wind up with self-appointed moral arbiters who flatter them by denigrating them — who make them feel smart enough to feel bad about themselves and what they're doing. But it's always a bad start when people who are deputized with finding the truth begin reflexively accepting lies about themselves. Because then they think there's nothing to lose by going to work for industrial-scale liars like Rupert Murdoch.